It’s been a day since we’ve left, and I’m already restless. I check for a green light, making sure it’s completely safe to wander around the small living area, before I plop myself onto a couch and go to the first channel on the little TV a few feet from me. At first, it plays nothing but a black and white mess and the crackle of static, but clears to reveal a middle aged woman with a perfect helmet of curled blonde hair. Her reporter’s voice is robotic: as of today, Cohort 3482 is the first group of humans ever to launch a Mars Living mission—

The message is cut off, and the screen goes dark. I turn my head and find another crew member I can’t name clutching the remote, with her finger still hovering over the off button. “Can’t believe they’re still broadcasting that same message. Ugh, I’m so sick of it.” She flips through stations until she finds a cartoon.

Whereas most of the crew is through with the press, paparazzi, and whatever coverage snuck of us that’s now plastered over every channel, I can’t stop watching it. I can’t stop.

I’m on a rocket plummeting through space, hurtling in an endless void of nothing, reminding me how small I am, reminding me of my insignificance.

Insignificant. I was, of course, until the Mars Living team, a branch off of NASA, finished their thousand-year project plan; making a foreign rock, so far from our home on earth, inhabitable. And somehow, in all of that, I ended up here, on one of the three ships carrying a total of 302 volunteers. The Santa Maria, carrying a third of the crew, will be my home for the next seven months, until we reach what people call the New World.

And maybe there, after all these years, I will finally be able to find what I haven’t on earth.

A purpose.

A will. A volition, pushing me to rise in the morning rather than ignoring the sun until the moon replaces it once again.

They call it the New World. A fresh start.

Then again, they said the same about Columbus.